Quotes from Tanya Saracho

I'm sad about my theatre career, but I've also fallen a bit in love with TV!

I have been watching male programming all my life. And I'm completely interested in it. Like, I love 'Breaking Bad' and I like 'Game of Thrones.'

Any time you have to move in two days, it's crazy. It's like, 'Who am I going to get to take care of my cat?

So many times, shows say they're set somewhere - like in Chicago, 'The Good Wife' - but it doesn't feel like Chicago.

When 'Vida' got the green light, Starz sent me this picnic basket of Jamie Fraser red wine and all these 'Outlander' things that I'll never open because it's like my sacred thing.

I'm always in the car in L.A., so I see the people I work with - and, thank God, I adore the people I work with - but it's a little lonely.

I have 16 plays, and we don't ever do subtitles. You can't do subtitles in the theater, so I was like, 'I'm not gonna do subtitles.' You'll never lose the story. There might be a little joke that you might miss, but you'll never miss the story, even in the Spanglish of it.

In lots of ways, I've been trying to tell stories this way since I started writing plays: a female-centered story with queer, Latinx gaze.

I always was missing that female brown queer perspective, and I think in 'Vida' we have that. A lot of things I wanted to touch on and deal with, I get to do here.

I adore 'Broad City,' but the one Latino is queer for jokes. You see queerness of Latinos in this emasculated with an accent or fez on a set '70s show. It's always like, 'Ha, ha, funny emasculated immigrants.'

The big, radical thing that I'm trying to do is to portray Latinas as complex human beings.

There is no 'generic' Latina.

People in L.A. think I'm insane to go back to Chicago during the winter. It's because I love my apartment and fleece leggings and my friends.

Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I'm borderline diabetic.

When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.

White, older showrunners told me, 'Why do you want to hire an all-Latinx writers room? Hire who's best for the show - don't get caught up in that.' And I was like, 'No.' For such an intimate show about the details of a culture? You can't fake that. The room needs to reflect the makeup of the show.

In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.

My first time up to bat as a showrunner, what I did was hire an all-Latinx writers room. And it's a diverse Latinx writers room - we have an Afro-Dominican and Texicans and Chileans. It's diverse within its Latinidad.

I am so homesick every day of the week.

I hope to see more Latino stories on television - not just on a personal level, but for us in the industry. We shouldn't just exist when a show is attempting to be diverse. We have good stories, and we are worth it.

Shouldn't you be able to tell your stories from your point of view? We're dealing with that with 'Looking' where some queers are like, 'These guys are so boring! They don't represent me!' But no show can represent everything, so is it OK for us, in 'Looking,' to write about these three men and their world?

When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.

The fact that I have a show on Starz, it's crazy. It's insane.

Write about your experiences! When I moved to L.A., I didn't have any friends, and the office janitor was the person who I saw the most. He would always come in at around 10:00 P.M., and I would still be at my desk, so I wrote a play about a first-year TV writer and the friendship that she developed with the janitor. Our stories matter.